


The Riptide

by thelongcon (rainer76)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, hannibal is besotted, hannibal takes issue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:34:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8165332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/thelongcon
Summary: It’s Hannibal’s version of a lighthouse perched above treacherous waters – a place to feel safe – harbours, anchors and sunken ships, where whimsy fell victim to the riptide.
Touch is such a small, inconsequential thing to be fixated on.





	

_The Nenets, previously known as the Samoyedic people, originated in Siberia, the Russian language morphs the_ **** **_samo_ ** _and_ **_yed_ ** _into one word, conveying the literal translation: ‘self-eater’._

__________  

 

 

 

“Cyproterone acetate.” In normal format it’s presented as a pill, white and innocuous; the orderlies at BSHCI crush it into a fine powder, sprinkled atop Hannibal’s porridge like dusted icing. The coffee is cheap and instant, the accompanying hash-brown on the banged up tray is undercooked, half-frozen in the centre. Hannibal hasn’t touched his breakfast. It’s a congealing mess that sits at the foot of his cot. Alana’s not surprised he recognised the drug – the orderlies have the option of treating him through ingestion or drugging him via injection and no one wants to be needlessly close to a confirmed cannibal. Not until the new security measures are in place.

Expression neutral, Hannibal stands behind his desk.

“Yes,” Alana replies.

She sees no reason to deny it.

“What justification do you have for chemical castration? I’m not a convicted paedophile nor am I a sexual deviant.”

His eyes sweep over her frame. Alana can remember when she thought there was heat in his gaze, a fondness for her body; she was right in one respect and wholly wrong in others. He’s sizing up the cut, looking for the choicest meat. Alana doesn’t know if that takes her a step above how they first departed - when Hannibal hadn’t seen fit to busy himself with her death – but stepped over Alana as if she were a soggy doormat.

“At least,” he amends. “Not sexually deviant to the extent _you_ complained when sharing my bed.”

The gibe is expected. Alana bites her tongue, lipstick bright red on her incisors. “High levels of testosterone, Hannibal, can correspond with even higher levels of aggression.  Choosing to castrate you chemically is tantamount to a safer working environment for my employees, my future employees, should they enter your cell. No one wants another Abel Gideon running loose.”  

There had been enough black marks, successful escapes, already.

“And your choice of - “ his lip curls – “further 'treatment', is not petty? Humiliation, say, via bodily control?”

If you can’t crack the mental composure wreck havoc with the body.

God complex, cannibal, psychopath, narcissist, sadist – they are all common descriptors in the three-ringed circus that constitutes Hannibal Lecter’s trial, words like charming, intelligent, hedonist and a sensualist aren’t bandied around quite as frequently. Hannibal’s all of those things. He’s a torturer and a killer, and even with a pharmaceutical cocktail of anti-psychotics and drugs in his system he picks up on her loose thread with quicksilver ease. “You won the position as Chief of Staff here? Are congratulations in order, Ms. Bloom?”

It was Chilton’s position once upon a time but he’s too busy with his novel now, with the court-case, with horror memories to ever want to reclaim the title.

“Doctor Bloom. All five keys reside inside my little pockets, Hannibal. I’ll be settled into my office by the time your trial is officially over.”

The Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is in need of an urgent update, funds are to be spent if the public is to feel a modicum of safety. Alana’s seen the lower tiers, damp cells, century old plumbing. She saw enough of the prison when Will was incarcerated and even then it looked like a medieval dungeon rather than a modern correctional facility. Alana has no doubt as to the outcome of the verdict today.

Neither, for that matter, does Hannibal.

She’s amused at his restraint, at the way he’s dismissed the cryproterone acetate. Mason’s brand is still healing between his shoulder blades, a stylized roman V that weeps under the shower heads, Jack’s scars can be seen on Hannibal’s cheekbone, calf, and she thinks for all their attempts to extract a mirrored revenge for Hannibal’s misdeeds, she prefers her way best. If sex is to become a weapon, a tool to hide a crime, then Alana would have it stricken from his repertoire.

“Are you going to ask, or is it unseemly to appear predictable?”

_I could hate him when I was in prison,_ Will had confessed, turning the tumbler around in his fingers. Whiskey had sloshed around the rim. It had been the first day of the trial and if Alana peeked out the window, she could see the media circus camped on the pavement. _Hating him was so easy when there was actual distance between us. And then –_

_He let you go,_ Alana had smiled. It felt brittle, like the shards of a broken window. _He let you come closer_. Will’s empathy had been fixated on Hannibal by then, trying to mirror all the things that would draw Hannibal out and into the open while Jack and the FBI circled.   _People tend to overlook the amount of sheer patience he has._ _He knew what he was doing Will; he knew what long-term exposure might mean for you._

Hannibal plays the long game. Always.

His reaction had been scornful, acerbic _. You think I didn’t?_

In Alana’s experience you can’t have Hannibal Lecter without Will Graham, among the bed-sheets, over kitchen meals, in the offices of the FBI Hannibal always turned their conversation toward one person. In hindsight, Alana might have taken issue with that. She can remember Hannibal in the kitchen, a bottle of beer in front of her while he peeled the vegies, spiced the meat, the careful way he had intoned – You never told me about Will – as if Alana had purposefully hidden, tucked Will away from Hannibal’s scrutiny; stolen precious time. Hannibal’s tone had been flat, and Alana imagines if his words were the first glimpse of steel - a blade in the room - then the edge held accusation.

Hannibal had known Will for a barely a month at that stage and the obsession was already beginning.  

It was before he set the other man up for multiple murders, before he sent a man diagnosed with an empathy disorder and had him placed amongst the worst of the criminally insane, let Will percolate there, before he slept with Alana, before he spoiled every good relationship in Will’s life.

Will only had three, before Jack and the BSU, Will had seven dogs, no nearby neighbours, Alana, and a hermits quiet solitude. _He wasn’t living at all,_ Hannibal had denounced.

She can hear the construction downstairs, iron bars removed and to be replaced by a plastic prison, air ventilation improved, CCTV updated to highest resolution. New electronic locks, Will’s old cell remodelled.

Hannibal was a gracious lover. His mouth was devastating, his appetite for sex, (sensation), was voracious as his hunger for art, murder, and fine wine. He had a yen for the rarefied and once upon a time Alana believed the rarefied included herself. Maybe the cryproterone acetate is petty – Hannibal’s in his forties, continued dosage means he might never recover, and she hardly suspects he’ll be docile in prison. Still, Alana can hold onto the slights done, work through her own sense of betrayal.

For a moment she thinks her question will remain unacknowledged but she knows Hannibal, there’s only one name he routinely bites for.  “Will he be there? For the sentencing?” he asks, eventually.

“No.” Will said his piece at trial and left. “He’s moving, Hannibal. Somewhere interstate, far from here.”

It’s the first time she sees a reaction. Hannibal’s fingers jolt, flex inward against the fake grain of his desk. His shoulders expand before he exhales. “Will you impart his new address for me, Alana? I have letters I wish to send.”

“No,” she repeats, dismissively: “This is how it ends for you.”

 

 

**

 

 

It ends for him on a cliff.

Hannibal’s property is lit up, floor to ceiling windows and a simple, understated style of furniture illuminated inside. There’s nothing of the Baltimore residence to be seen, none of the opulence of Europe and the grand apartments Hannibal had favoured. It’s simple in the way he once thought Will might appreciate.   It’s Hannibal’s version of a lighthouse perched above treacherous waters – a place to feel safe – harbours, anchors and sunken ships, where whimsy fell victim to the riptide.

Touch is such a small, inconsequential thing to be fixated on, it gives context to a relationship.

The wind blows in from the Atlantic; the moon scuttles behind the clouds and Dolarhyde’s blood is a uniform black.

It carries - the sharp tang of it filling his nostrils - the thrill of the hunt like the first breath of fresh air after being buried alive. Hannibal’s mind is singing, the pain in his side negligible. There are clumps of flesh caught between his teeth and his chin is dripping in blood. He pulls Will up when the other man motions for a hand, lets him stagger and sway against his own body. Will  doesn’t reclaim his distance, fingers insistent, body curving inward. He fits. He fits in all the ways Hannibal had imagined.

It feels hyper-real. The light has the quality of a dream.

He’s starving: malnourished. Hannibal’s touch deprived and this day marks the first real independence in three years. Everything in this moment is over-saturated. Hannibal doesn’t know if it’s the last dregs of chemical interference leaving his system (his moods and reactions will be out of sorts until he is clear), or if it’s Will who lights him up in this manner; like a jolt of ECT his muscles spasm at the contact. Hannibal pulls him close, reels him in, breathes in the smell, the taste, imprints the feel of bone against his breast because this is everything Hannibal’s ever wanted, a campaign waged and won. It feels less like surrender and more like acceptance when Will sags against him.

It’s the first time he’s touched Hannibal of his own accord.

"This is all I ever wanted for you Will, for the both of us."  .

After Tobias, he sat close enough Hannibal could feel his heat, smell the fevered sweetness on his skin, he had thought for a fleeting moment Will might, _might,_ reach out but he hadn’t.   The first touch was Hannibal’s, when Will promised to keep Abigail’s secret (and by extension Hannibal’s complicity), and Hannibal had folded his palm over Will’s shoulder like a sworn promise.

Eventually, Hannibal stole all of his precious touches – drugging Will insensate, hands sure and possessive on his face – soothing Will’s hair back from his forehead, a plastic tube in one hand after he fed an ear down his throat, binding Will’s knuckles together after Randall: pulling him close, so close, as the knife opened Will’s belly and spilled his intestines onto the pristine floor. They were touching from thigh to torso, chins hooked over each other’s shoulders - Will gasping wetly in his arms - and later Hannibal’s cock was stained red with Will’s blood. He washed off the betrayal in Bedelia’s shower, painted from the waist down.

Hannibal would have worn him for days if it were feasible.

Other moments too: Chiyoh in Florence, palm resting on Will’s nape before he dug the bullet out; carrying him from Muskrat farm. Hannibal’s always touched Will with surety; trying to impart an impression that would last, leave his mark on a personality built from sand and water.

To touch Will and have it be permanent.

His friend.  His family.  His lover and his sibling, his god painted on an ancient canvas. Will’s face is bloody in the moonlight, shoulder ruined by Dolarhyde’s knife; he slides a thigh between Hannibal’s legs to off-shift the centre of his balance, fingers kneading at Hannibal’s torso, bicep, the edge of a thumb catching across his left nipple, a sudden jolt that shakes Hannibal to the core. Hannibal’s flaccid, balls shrunken for years now. He hasn’t been hard since the BSHCI, he hasn’t been out of the hospital long enough to determine if the effects are permanent, but he can feel his pulse surge, want and satisfaction and hollow need keening like the wind over the bluff. His fingers dig in. He’s won, Hannibal rejoices, and he doesn’t count the cost of it, the tricks of the battlefield.   Like when Will first met him, Hannibal’s eyes are firmly closed against the truth of events when the world tilts off-kilter.

Hannibal holds onto the feeling – _Will_ _holds onto him_ – until they meet the edge of the sea.

 

 

 

 


End file.
